


hello, goodbye and everything inbetween

by queenofthecon



Category: Bon Appétit Test Kitchen RPF, Chef RPF
Genre: F/M, the first rule of rpf club is we do not talk about rpf club
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 10:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20006632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenofthecon/pseuds/queenofthecon
Summary: Brad doesn't like Claire. They're about as different as two people can get.





	hello, goodbye and everything inbetween

**Author's Note:**

> god why am I doing this, this is trash. Please do not do as I do. Standard RPF club rules apply - this is not real, will never be real but I will still die on this flaming trash pile.
> 
> Please respect the F in RPF stands for fiction. None of this is real and no harm is intended to anyone depicted fictionally here. I just had fun pretending, don't hate me or anyone else who uses RPF as escapism from the awful world going on around us. We are dreamers, and that is all.

Brad doesn’t like Claire. She’s the new girl, though, and he wants to try, to make an effort, wants to make her like him so they can work next to each other, maybe even share a countertop without calling it no-man’s land and getting out the blue masking tape to partition the borders. He just doesn’t like Claire, but that’s _fine_.

It won’t work, really. She’s shy and quiet to start, and that’s easier to deal, just a couple days of keeping her head down and getting on with learning the ropes he’s teaching her, but a Harvard girl – she doesn’t keep that to herself for long – is a Harvard girl through and through and so she corrects him at everything he says wrong. Brad says a lot of things wrong.

“You mean endothermic, not exothermic,” Claire says on day four of her first week when he’s trying to show her where the anodised sheet trays are. Claire was specific about the anodised ones, as if a sheet tray isn’t a sheet tray to him. Whatever; she’s the fancy-ass pastry chef with all the qualifications he never got so what does he know about sheet pans. “Endothermic absorbs heat, exothermic expels it. It’s middle school level chemistry, if that.”

“Exo, endo, you know what I meant. Heat’s heat, Claire, it’s all just molecules or atoms or some shit, doing a dance, getting friction going, bumping and grinding,” he grins a little wider at the look on her face. It’s like he said climate change wasn’t real. Boy that had been a weird first day and he wasn’t even taking an opposing stance. “Science!” he declares, throwing his arms up in the air.

Claire stares at Brad as if he’s three years old and just spoke in gibberish and run on sentences that don’t mean anything. She isn’t far off, to be honest. “I don’t even have time to explain how wrong you are on, like, five different levels.” She has that shocked face he’s starting to learn about plastered all over her like she just can’t suppress her disgust. It means he’s pushing a button, a big red one and he can’t resist buttons he shouldn’t be pressing, especially when they’re connected to the new girl. She’s easy to wind up.

He finds the sheet pan she wants from the tallest cabinet they have, pulls it out and hands it to her. It swamps her immediately given how short she is.

“Why don’t you write it down and test me later instead? Haven’t had a pop quiz since high school, I could do with a few pointers about hypothermic reactions.”

“See, now you’re just trying to piss me off,” Claire says. And there it is. That grin in her eyes, a crinkle at the corner that means he’s getting off scott-free with being kind of a douche. She’s everything he’s not, but that’s _fine_ as long as he can get that grin out of her once a day just to know he’s toeing the right line in not pissing off the new girl too much. They might not be buddy-buddies but it’ll be alright. 

“Workin’, ain’t it?” he replies, shutting the cabinet and dashing back to his station to catch his onions before they burn. She calls it karma when they do.

-

Claire doesn’t like Brad. They’re so different; like oil and water without an emulsifier.

In the month she’s known him, some of his quirks have calmed down and others have roared to the surface. She likes order, precision, method, technique, and most of all, taking her time. There’s nothing she can’t break down and rebuild anew, like working a cookie recipe until it’s the best damn cookie in the tri-state area. But Brad just keeps throwing curveballs at her, pushing and pushing until she figures he just doesn’t like her either and wants to see her suffer.

But Claire doesn’t quit. She’ll whine and complain and downright bitch if she thinks she can get away with it, but she won’t quit, and she won’t let him get to her.

“I dunno, Claire, I feel like I’m missing something,” Brad says to her with a tiny smug smirk she hates, shovelling half a cookie in his face while they are just barely cool enough to eat. “You added salt right, you gotta add salt!”

“In the dough and Maldon on top,” she exclaims, a little offended at the suggestion she’d forget the damn salt. “Is it too chewy?”

“No, no, no,” Brad says, shovelling the other half in his mouth. “It’s just not _sfijuggre_.” Crumbs fall from his mouth onto the countertop, her eyes following them before snapping to his face. He outright grins now and there’s some joke she’s not part of.

“Try swallowing first.” He’s definitely doing it on purpose. Claire picks apart one of the cookies, studying the crumb with her fingertips to feel if it’s too dry, too wet, too crumbly, too sticky. It looks fine to her; moist but not damp, with a good snap at the edges just like she likes. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Did you try the dough before you baked it?” he says off-handedly, licking his lips before going back to his station. Brad makes butchering a leg of lamb seem like walking on air; she’s not that great with knife skills, even now. Not a lot of call for butchering in pastry work.

“Ew no, salmonella,” Claire says, wondering sincerely if there's something wrong with his head.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Claire,” he shrugs; the knife he’s holding glides through the meat and she wishes he’d just goddamn tell her.

She blows air on a cookie to cool it down before taking a bite. In an instant she knows what she’s done wrong. There’ll be no living with him after this. “Fuck me.”

Brad laughs victoriously as if he’s pressed the button this time and won a prize. “Yep.”

“Shut up,” she almost snaps, sighing and dropping the bitten cookie onto a tray. “Am I an idiot?”

“What? No!” he says, incredulously chuckling at her. She’s definitely an idiot if Brad’s laughing. “It’s an easy mistake, Claire, you’re just so caught up in the grams and the right kind of brown to white sugar ratios and three stage creaming method, you just skip over it.”

It doesn’t make her feel much better. Who the fuck forgets to put chocolate chips in their chocolate chip cookies? She chalks it up to being nervous still, being in a new kitchen, in a big open station area, all the eyes on her. She figures this is gonna go down in history in the BA test kitchen – the chipless cookie catastrophe. Something about it is just embarrassing. She’s been hired because of her skills and she’s done the dumbest thing she’s ever done, that anyone’s ever done. Claire refuses to let it sit there and taunt her.

“Goddamn it,” she mutters, picking up the tray and moving to take it over to the trash. She wants to slide every chip-less cookie into the abyss and hide her shame from people who were looking at her to do a good job.

Before she can even take a step, Brad grabs her arm to stop her. “Oh no, no, no, don’t you try and hide those. Own up to it, Claire, just dip them in chocolate or something, make them into a crust, don’t waste it. They’re still good, just not what you planned.” He grabs another one and shoves it in his mouth whole, though she thinks he’s just trying to make a point instead of being nice.

It’s easier to give up than to try and make plain cookies taste good, but he had a good point. She hated when Brad had a good point. They happened so rarely that it's only good to encourage the behaviour. She could do this, make something great out of a mess.

“I guess I could do a drizzle,” she says. He seems proud.

Claire spends the next three hours trying to temper chocolate and curses his name.

\- 

Six months in, Brad’s warming up to Claire.

Yeah, she’s still looking at the tiny weeny details more often than the big picture, and she’s annoying and whiny sometimes, but she’s one of them and doesn’t hide her fuck ups any more. The chipless cookies had been the worst mistake but they weren’t the last and soon he and the others were catching her up on their own stories of fuck-ups of years past, like when Morocco had a bad cold one winter and ended up pouring balsamic into a beef sauce instead of Worcestershire. That had been Brad’s personal favourite. Carla had spat it out into the sink.

They’re the beginnings of a team, all of them, talking and ribbing each other, getting on each other’s nerves, exchanging stories about shitty jobs and laughing at where they are. Claire’s just one of the guys and she tells her fair share of tales too. They’re getting there.

Brad does like that Claire stays late. _Always_ stays late. When he’s clocking out at six, she’s still there working on a new kind of this-or-that, with her notebook full of scratchy handwriting that’s worse than his, her pen chewed to shit like she has to be doing something or she’ll combust on the spot. He hopes she doesn’t notice that he looks back at her as he says goodnight and that he smiles and shakes his head when she mumbles the same. Come morning, she’ll have figured it out or would beg Carla or Morocco for help to make it happen before she’d go to him. He didn’t know shit about baking yet. Brad wanted to learn though, and wasn’t Claire the best one to teach him a trick or two?

“Just go slow at first,” she says, drying off her hands on a dish towel hanging from her apron. “You go quick and it’ll just seize and curdle, and you’re done for.”

He’s concentrating as hard as he can concentrate on pouring hot cream and vanilla onto egg yolks and sugar, trying to make custard. This is attempt three. Brad and concentrating did not get on well the first two times; the first, he’d dumped in the cream before she’d even given an instruction. He should work on listening too.

“I got it, Claire, nice and slow or it’ll curdle, blah, blah, blah, who knew custard was this hard, huh?” he asks, glancing up at her as steam rises from the bowl.

Brad watches Claire’s face, her stare intent on the mixer as it tempers the heat from the cream to the eggs, not even seeing that he isn’t paying attention to his job anymore. There’s a determination in her glare, like his fuck-ups are somehow hers and she had to make him get it right this time or it’d tarnish her name. He didn’t want her mad at him when they were finally getting along, figuring out how to work together well.

“That’s great, Brad, it’s nearly there. Give it another minute and it can go back into the pan on the heat to thicken a little more.” She sounds so proud of him, just genuinely proud without derision or condescending. “You just temper the yolks with the cream first, or the heat of it will ruin the texture and you go back to square one. Little by little, every time. No shortcuts.”

“Yes ma’am,” Brad replies without a hint of disdain. “You’re the boss lady around here now, huh? Six months and you got me wrapped around your little finger.”

“It wasn’t hard, to be honest,” she smiles. “You seem flexible.” He doesn’t miss the way her nose crinkles up as she giggles, genuinely giggles, at her own dumb joke. Was it even a joke enough to giggle at?

He grins along with her anyway, to be polite. The custard turns out thick, creamy, glossy and sweet enough without being a one punch hit of sugar round your jaw to make your teeth hurt. He doesn’t have the heart to tell her he hates custard. She just seems so proud.

-

Claire thinks that Brad – that everyone at BA, really – is a friend now. It’s been a year working at the test kitchen and the best year of her life. Professionally speaking, at least.

Things had gotten easier. Brad’s always going to be loud, and brash and everything about him is like he’s a two year old golden retriever who thinks he’s still a puppy, but that’s just Brad. She likes his passion best of all, how he can just throw ingredients in until something clicks in his brain and it’s the best thing ever to watch happen. His best dishes are lightning striking a beach and turning the sand to glass, and she envies how he can just pick things that go together, as if he’s a matchmaker sent by the divine food God. He just knows what works and what doesn’t.

The whole gang’s drinking in a bar a few blocks from the kitchens and she’s getting a little tipsy on gin and tonics and shitty whiskey. A whole year of Claire going from chipless cookies to making perfect versions of home bakes, made from scratch and now venturing into different territory.

“How’s the drink?” he asks, his cheeks a little rosy though she didn’t think he’d ever cop to that.

“Super bad, oh my god,” she replies, her voice low just in case the staff heard. That would be mortifying. “Did they put like citric acid in or something, it’s so sour!”

Without a word, he plucks the glass from her hand and takes a swig, his expressive face crumpling like a bit of paper. “Holy fuck that’s so bad. What the Hell do you do to whiskey to make it taste like baby vomit?”

Claire laughs until tears leak from her eyes with the rest of the table before she pushes her drink away, regretting ordering whiskey in what she now realises is a dive bar. “I should stick to beer.”

His arm’s around the back of her chair, dangling safely away from her shoulder, lazily lolling. “IPA all the way, baby,” he finishes his bottle, chatting animatedly with Andy to her right while Claire asks Carla about the next big project for the magazine.

When Molly finally finishes her drink, Claire stands with her purse. “This one’s mine, same all round?” she asks, listening as they all talk over each other to get their orders in, some tipsy, some half-drunk.

Even Claire’s feeling warm from the alcohol and has to put her tiny hands on Brad’s wide shoulders to get past him to the bar, so much so that it annoys her when he jumps up from his seat just as she climbs free. “I can help you since nobody else is getting off their asses to,” he teases, catching up to her easy.

The bartender takes her order – no whiskey involved – and she waits as he fixes it, the voices getting loud around her. It must be nearly 9pm. “You didn’t have to come help, I got it,” she says up at Brad. For some reason, Claire feels so damn short next to this giant of a man, especially when he’s crouching down just to hear her.

“S’alright, Claire, what am I gonna do, listen to Andy bitch about the schedule for like the fiftieth time?” he grins again. Claire likes his grins. “’Sides, I gotta ask you something, been buggin’ me.”

Why does her stomach flip like that? “What?” she asks as the bartender puts two glasses of ice cold hard cider on her tray.

“I just heard a little rumour about you going over to work downtown, y’know. I got a couple buddies working at Llewellyn’s, say you came in for an interview with the owners, getting all chatty Cathy about menus. You thinking about leaving us already?”

Claire blinks. She didn’t think anyone had found out about that. “No!” she says immediately, defensively. “It wasn’t an interview, they just called me and said to come down, talk about stuff and opportunities.”

“I think that’s called a job interview, Claire.” Brad looks at her differently than he’s looked at her. Disappointed, angry, annoyed; she isn’t sure what it is, but she doesn’t like it. “You gonna take it?”

“No, no, no,” she says, as if she’d already made up her mind. “It wasn’t my style, it was just… nice being headhunted.”

“Kinda glad to hear it. I’d miss the weird cookies,” Brad nods just once and slips the bartender a fifty, telling him to keep the change. “C’mon, I miss Andy’s bitching already.”

“Wait, I thought it was my round?” she asks rhetorically. Brad’s even carrying the giant tray as if it were made of air. “Let me pay you back, at least.”

“No way, Saffitz. Consider it an investment in your future with us,” he replies, thumping the drinks down. Their friends descend on them as if dying of thirst. “Talent like yours ain’t going anywhere if I got a say in it.”

“Wait, you’re leaving?” Molly asks suddenly, affronted. “You can’t quit, you just got here!”

The next ten minutes become a cacophony of drunken praise being belted at her from all of her co-workers, asking her not to quit, telling her she’s too good to let go. It’s nice being appreciated, really; it’s nice to know that they give a damn about whether she stays or leaves. Neither Claire nor Brad tell them she’s already made her mind up about staying. His arm’s back around her chair and the grin’s on his face as if he did it all on purpose. She’s not sure he didn’t.

By the end of the night, Claire knows BA is her home and these people are her friends.

-

Yes, friends fits now. They work together, eat lunch once a week from the leftovers table together, go out for drinks once a month with the guys and talk about food more often than they eat it. It’s a way of life for him, always has been since he’s just the greediest bastard going and wants to try everything, dipping fingers and spoons in and out of pans and pots that don’t belong to him. Most people get annoyed. Claire actively encourages it.

When the memo goes around about the YouTube shit, doing cooking videos, Brad’s the first to sign his name up to be on camera. He probably shouldn’t, but he signs Claire’s name up too - she’s wasted behind the scenes, he thinks, all that talent and personality bundled up in a perfect face and goofiness hidden under three layers of insecurity. Not that she’d ever agree to do it. The look on her face when the camera test list goes up is hilarious and is totally worth the risk to their friendship.

“But people aren’t gonna like me, Brad,” she whines in the Claire way of whining, without actually meaning it. “Why’d you do this? It’s not a good prank. I don’t wanna do it. I’m not gonna do it.”

“Just do it,” he says, exasperated, leaning on the counter next to her. Claire’s peeling a fuck-ton of peaches for some dessert or jam, maybe, he doesn’t know; he grabs one to help, the skin slipping off easy since she’s blanched them. “It’s just doing what you do when you boss me about, you know, just teaching idiots how to bake. If you can teach me to make a chiffon cake, you can do it to a camera lens.” He slices and pits the peach, just a little slower than she can – it’s a fairly good approximation of what she’s been doing though, and she doesn’t say anything so it must be fine. How Claire can do this in her hand like lightning but not prep seafood, he doesn’t know.

“I’m sorry, have you not been on the internet lately?” she says incredulously. “They’re so mean, about like everything, especially the food channels. I’d get mauled for something tiny, that’s way too much for my delicate ego to deal with.”

The idea of people being mean about Claire ruffles him somehow. He doesn’t want to think about assholes hiding behind a screen, critiquing every little word and movement. Worse are the creeps who’d say something disgusting. But she has to do it; he doesn’t want to do it without her. “It won’t be like that and even if they are, I’ll hunt them down and beat their asses in for ya.” Brad shrugs and reaches for another peach to peel. “Problem solved.”

“Thanks, that’s a great solution,” she says sarcastically but she chuckles too, so he’s got away with it. “Multiple murder, that’s your go-to? What if they say I can’t bake or that I’m ugly or annoying-”

“Did I not just say I’ll beat them with a rolling pin?” Brad replies, wanting to lick the sticky peach juice from his fingers. She’ll smack him if he does. “And nobody in the world could call you ugly, Claire. Please don’t let me do this thing without you.”

She doesn’t have to say anything, but there’s a flush of pink against her nose that he thinks is the cutest shit he’s ever seen.

“Oh yeah?” she says, slicing through another peach quicker than he can do anything at all. And she thinks she has no knife skills. “Fine. I’ll do the dumb camera test and if I get picked to do anything, I’ll hold you to your agreement to beat up anyone who criticises me in any way.”

Brad feels like he got played, somehow. “Deal, done, sealed, delivered. You’re gonna love it, Saffitz, you’re gonna be famous!” He can’t resist and licks his fingers disgustingly, the peach juice dribbling down his hands. Claire smacks his arm and shoos him away from her galettes, the pink still spreading across her nose.

By the time the camera tests come around, she’s better than he is, but they both get chosen for early segments anyway. Brad knows he’s an idiot of epic proportions but he’s also hot as shit when it comes to food and they eat it up. Claire does good, real good, too, and people think she’s cute as a fucking button, because she is: the internet’s adorable, overachieving little sister.

It’s a wild ride. YouTube changes everything.

-

By the end of their first year making videos, Brad’s calling her Half-Sour Saffitz so much that the nickname sticks. Claire pretends to hate it, because he’s right and Brad being right is a giant no-no still, and he’s just gonna argue about it being cute and not derogatory, even if it was basically her idea. Claire doesn’t hate the nickname, though, and they just bicker back and forth about it instead, winding each other up the way they do. What they do agree on is the best type of pickle because she’ll be damned if sweet pickles are better than half-sours or even bread and butter pickles or dill. Sweet is the worst kind of pickle and for once, Brad doesn’t fight her on it.

His YouTube videos are the ones getting the most views though, and it’s showing. Brad gets to go to Hawaii, to Italy and down to New England for all of his segments with Vince. The crowds of millions watching him eat up his personality and can’t get enough because he’s Brad and he’s made for the camera with his intense personality. Claire doesn’t blame them for loving him and doesn’t blame him for taking the opportunity to travel, but it’s so damn quiet these days.

She misses the noise when Brad’s not there. She misses the bickering and his laughter and frenetic energy bouncing off the walls. He still has the vague aura of a golden retriever, only now he’s got a million toys to play with, which is fine. It’s fine. Claire doesn’t need Brad’s opinion or his validation when she can’t get a take right making an apple pie for Thanksgiving videos. The comments aren’t as bad as she thought, but they’re not that great either and she wishes he was there to tell her to get a grip. It’s not like she _misses_ him. No. Probably more of the fact that she’s just not great on camera without a challenge or a distraction, and Brad definitely challenges and distracts her.

It takes months for them to find a format that works with her style. Claire and junk food don’t have the most harmonious of relationships to begin with, and the videos involve a lot more sugar work and chocolate tempering than she’s happy to do on camera, but they’re definitely a challenge and Claire’s finally, finally thriving under the right amount of pressure. The team helps, and Brad does too when he’s there and not on some fishing boat fulfilling his destiny, but she can do this herself. She spends three days figuring out each recipe down to the closest approximation, making them better each time. Or completely fucks up and tries to justify cheating.

The mixer’s struggling this time, though.

“Oh my god, fire, fire!” she calls, eyes wide, stepping back from the KitchenAid mixer as smoke starts to pour from the motor. “Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” There’s a camera in her face and she yanks the cord from the wall, panicking, heart jumping. The smoke keeps coming.

Brad comes barrelling down behind her station, calm and cool and extinguisher in hand, and douses the mixer – and all of her prototypes – in foam. Everything is a blanket of white, like the snow outside coating most of New York. It’s all gone. Three days of work, recipe development, notes – gone. Claire just stands there.

For his credit, Brad looks at her sheepishly when he realises what he’s done. “So, uh… fire’s out, right?” he gestures. The whole kitchen has come to a grinding halt and is looking over to see what’s happened, and there’s some giggling coming from someone in the back. “It’s not that bad.”

Claire surveys the three inch thick foam on her desk before turning to look at Brad and his wide eyes of fear. Belly rolls of laughter just pour out of her and fill up the room. “Oh my god, I hope they were filming that. You were filming that, right, Danny?” she asks the camera guy. His equipment got off lightly from Brad’s overzealous extinguishing, but Danny himself looks like he’s got a head full of dandruff. It just makes her laugh harder.

“Y’okay there Claire?” Brad says, sounding relieved but tentative, as if she’s gone insane. She probably has.

Claire nods, still laughing until she’s hiccupping. There’s floating flecks of foam around the place, settling on the heads of everyone within a five yard radius. “Jesus Christ, you’re completely insane…” she says.

“Me?” Brad replies. Danny’s dashed off to save the camera and the footage from the foam and she’s still laughing. “I ain’t the one laughing like a maniac…”

The kitchen towels are dry safely behind her, so she rips some off the roll and rubs down her face roughly. “If you don’t laugh, what are you gonna do?” she says, shrugging. Claire looks up at Brad, empty extinguisher in one hand. He’s covered in a light dusting of foam and she bursts into laughter again. “Hold still, dumb-dumb. You got some schmutz…”

Claire wipes off his face a little more delicately than her own, grinning from ear to ear. She’s missed him. She’s missed this anarchy.

“Why’re you not tearing me a new one for destroying your whole week?” he asks, dropping the extinguisher to the floor. Brad looks down at his arms and feet and both look like he’s gone swimming in marshmallow fluff.

“Oh, I’m sure when I come in tomorrow morning, I’ll hate your guts for like, three full minutes,” Claire says, giving up on wiping the foam off him. It’s a lost cause, just like her attempt at Snickers.

“Just three?” he’s smirking now, taking the towels off her. “Eh I don’t like the sound of three, let’s make it five.” Before she can say a word, Brad scoops up a handful of the foam from the counter and throws it at her, the glob hitting her square in the face before dripping down her chin. “Bullseye!”

Brad, the coward, ducks behind a counter as she scoops up her own handful of foam. “Cheater!”

Yes, Claire thinks, she definitely misses the anarchy. They spend the afternoon half cleaning and half throwing foam balls at each other. The next morning, despite everything, Claire knocks her recipe out of the park.

\- 

Brad’s in deep, deep, _deep_ shit when he realises what’s happening.

It's not like he planned for this, no; it's a whole fucking thing and totally unintentional, and completely not his fault. It’s been creeping on him like a tide coming in on your fun day at the beach and suddenly your sandcastle’s gone and… he’s really not that great at metaphors. YouTube’s gone crazier than he expected and everything’s fucking insane now. He’s on actual fucking television, trying to make bison tartare sound like something people actually eat, and it’s just fucking _insane_ like real, goddamn insane. He loves it.

Brad’s pretty sure he loves Claire too. It’s just a little bit, maybe not even worth anything, and it’s not gonna go anywhere, but he’s definitely in deep, deep, _deep_ shit because he’s on the internet and everyone’s probably gonna see how he’s a goddamn idiot who can’t help but poke and prod at the same co-worker again and again and they’re gonna _know_. It doesn’t help that their chemistry is pure 24k gold, so they keep getting thrown together and making a mess. It’s fucking beautiful.

Today though, he’s cooking on his own without a camera in his face, glad for the reprieve from being a thousand million percent conscious of everything he’s doing. Three gorgeous, deep dark cast-iron skillets are heating up in the oven until they’re hot enough to burn the entire kitchen down just so he could try out new cornbread recipes for the spring and barbecue season. Claire’s working on a biscuit dough or something and they’re just chatting, and it’s normal, and it’s _fine._

He pulls a red-hot skillet from the oven just as his phone goes off in his pocket, and he scrambles to answer it like he always does. It’s no more than a minute his back is turned away from his station, maybe, but it’s enough for Claire to realise the skillet’s been left behind and wrap her bare hand around the handle.

The cry of pain he hears from her makes him feel sick. Claire swears and drops the skillet on the floor with a giant crash.

Brad swears under his breath and runs for her but Molly’s already there, trying to keep her calm as Claire’s hand forms nasty, painful blotches and blisters from the burn. “Shit, shit, Claire, you okay?” he says, panicking. “It’s okay, you’re okay…”

“Get the box,” Molly orders as she holds Claire’s palm under a stream of water in the sink, trying to distract her from the pain.

But Claire’s face is pale and she’s biting her lip hard, her dark eyes are wide and watery, and Brad thinks he’s gonna fucking die if he doesn’t make it better, if he doesn’t do something. They’d all had burns, but that scream had cut through him like nothing and he’s a fucking mess. He doesn’t even remember Gaby running for the first aid box and tossing it to him, but he rips it open anyway, pulling everything out.

“I’m fine, it’s fine,” Claire mutters softly, the tears streaking down her cheeks freely. Her hand is shaking under the water. “I’m an idiot…”

“Jesus, no, it’s all my fault, I shouldn’t have left it out,” he hates himself in that moment, when she thinks it’s her being clumsy when Brad has the attention span of a three year old and walked away from a hot skillet without thinking. “Molly agrees with me, don’t you Mol?” 

“Totally Brad’s fault,” Molly says, leaving Claire to keep the water running over her burn while she preps the bandages. “Everything’s Brad’s fault generally, but this one definitely is.”

Relief floods over him when Claire half smiles, even though it doesn’t reach her eyes. There’s always this thing with Claire, where every emotion on her face is somehow both at the surface and buried at the same time. He doesn’t know why she tries to hide the pain, maybe just to not put people out when they have stuff to do, because that’s so _Claire_ he could cry.

“See, Saffitz, you gotta let me take the L on this one,” he says. Brad’ll never live this down. One day, it’ll be another story to drunkenly tell on Fridays after work to the new kitchen staff, but right now Claire’s in shock and in pain because of him and if he doesn’t get a laugh out of her then he’s not worthy of being her friend. “I’ll let you squash my foot in that Pizelle press if you want. You don’t even gotta grease me up first, so I’ll never get it off.”

It’s a relief when she laughs and wipes her tears from her cheeks with her un-burned hand. Molly’s turned off the water now and has Claire’s palm in hers. The burns look painful, and he knows they are, but they all see that they aren’t deep enough for a hospital and that’s all he cares about.

“You got lucky there, looks like you’ll live,” Molly says, delicately drying Claire’s hand off before she treats and wraps it in gauze. “But maybe don’t go near Brad for a while.” 

Claire laughs but it’s a little hollow and Brad wishes the last ten minutes had never happened. “I’m bad news, Saffitz, better keep your distance, or next time I’ll cut ya!”

It’s not working. Her eyes are still tearing, and her face is still pale as ever, and he misses her blush and her belly laughter and the nose crinkles. He has to do something. Brad doesn’t think as he wraps his arms around her petite form and Claire practically sags into him in return, keeping her burned hand far away from his body. Her face presses into his chest for a moment like she’s trying to hide the remnants of her pain from the world: Brad’s heart is hammering in his chest as he rubs her back in small circles. Molly’s nowhere to be seen when they pull apart finally and he’s not sure how long that hug is, but he really fucking needed it as much as she did.

Brad looks down at Claire and the flush is back in her cheeks, her bottom lip a little reddened from where she’s been biting it. His blunt fingers push her hair from her face and it’s only a moment but for once it’s just theirs – no cameras, no co-workers, no food or bickering.

She’s beautiful, as she always has been, and he’s just _so_ fucking screwed.

-

Claire’s hand takes a couple months to heal completely from the splotches and blisters to pink, new skin forming on her fingertips and across her palm. She knows Brad still feels bad about it since he’s been asking her every morning how her hand is and is helping her with her work before she’s even asked anyone. He’s kind, even if she thinks most of it comes from guilt, and that makes her stomach flip in somersaults until it’s difficult to hide. It’s hard to imagine how she hadn’t really liked him much when they first met and where they are now.

He texts her every day now and sometimes it’s just a picture of his breakfast and other days it’s a whole chain of texts about how she’s missing out by not owning a TV – Claire thinks they’re a waste of money when everything’s online she cares to watch. He squeezes her shoulder when he moves past her, he leans down to look in her eyeline when she’s in the test kitchen, he smiles wider when they bicker and she wins. It’s all a whirlwind of change and growth so much it makes her head spin.

So, it’s hard to pinpoint _when_ her feelings change, but they do so vociferously.

They shouldn’t work, not on paper anyway, but for some reason he’s the perfect counter for her neuroses. Claire’s got stacks of books out for the next video she’s shooting now her hand’s healed and there’s post-its and bits of papers in multiple pages across her living room floor and she’s actually _excited_ about getting back to work on Monday, getting to see him. It doesn’t matter that she knows he doesn’t like her that way, that she’s reading too much into his kindnesses; Brad makes her want to be better at her job. And here she is, on a Saturday night, scribbling notes upon notes about the effect of acid and base incorporation into sugar chains, just so she doesn’t let herself down by giving up when it gets too hard.

Claire looks at the clock and sees it’s nearly 11pm already and she’s hungry and there’s nothing in the apartment she wants to eat. It seems like fate when her phone lights up in her lap and it’s Brad, somehow. It’s always Brad these days. 

**22.39**

u still up?

**22.40**

bet ur workin on poprocks

**22.42**

You know me too well.

Why are you up so late?

**22.45**

shitty date, blew it off and missed the last train

i’m near urs

**22.48**

Yeah, you can crash on my couch.

But bring pizza. I’m starving.

**22.53**

deal

b there soon

Claire can’t clean the place quick enough. It’s getting close to midnight when the buzzer at her door goes and she hesitates for a second before letting him up. It’ll be fine, she tells herself. They’re friends – good friends – and he’s been on a date tonight, so it’s not like he’s coming to hers on purpose. To Brad, she’s just a couch to crash on and breakfast in the morning because he knows she’s kind of a sucker for showing off for company. French toast, or pancakes with warm blueberry syrup if she can get to the market in the morning.

The knock comes at the door and she wrenches it open. Brad’s there, pizza box balanced on one hand and a box in the other. “Hey, come on in,” she says, grabbing the pizza box. “Pepperoni and mushroom?”

“It’s your go-to, right?” he asks, stepping inside her apartment. It’s not the first time he’s been there but it’s never been at night before. “Or are you allergic to mushrooms. It’s one or the other.”

“First one,” she replies, shutting the door as he steps past her. “Sorry about the mess, I was-”

“Pop rocks, yeah, I figured you’d be trying to work some voodoo magic trying to make that work without the pipe bomb idea Amiel had,” Brad grins and sets the box he had been carrying on her coffee table, next to the couch. He’s brought beer, and it’s the brand she actually likes. “Thanks for letting me crash, it’s been the shittiest of shitty nights Claire, oh my god, this woman,” he groans, pulling off his jacket and dumping it across the back of her couch. “You think you hit the peak of shitty dating in New York and then it just tops itself. I almost wanted to top myself.”

Claire chuckles and can’t resist the smell of hot pepperoni any longer, sitting her butt back on the floor where she’d still had her books and her notes. “What happened?” she asks, ripping a slice out viciously. “I bet you I’ve had worse, whatever it is.”

Brad makes a weird high-pitched Brad-noise and sits on the edge of the couch. It’s already made up for him with the back cushions pulled off and a couple pillows and thick blankets she has to spare. “Oh no, you can’t win with this one. So, I get to this place where we’re going for dinner and I’m sitting there for like a half hour waiting on this girl and I was about to call it quits and then in she comes and acts like she’s been waiting on me.”

“If this is as bad as your taste in women gets, I think you’re gonna lose,” Claire says, grinning as she eats her pizza bribe.

“I’m not done, let a guy tell the story, Saffitz,” Brad complains, reaching over to steal a slice. It’s only because they’re friends that she doesn’t smack his hand away. “And this is a blind date, alright, not like I fished her drunk out of a bar or something, y’know? And this woman, she would-not-shut-up allllllll night,” he shakes his head, weary. “I try and get a word in, tell her she looks pretty, lay on a bit of charm, and she says ‘well you coulda looked nice for me at least, this is a classy place’ and I’m just sitting there like, what the fuck, I got on a dress shirt,” he gestures wildly at his shirt and Claire can see the outline of a large drink-sized stain running down it, just barely visible. “And I thought I’d cleaned up good.”

“Eh,” Claire says and shrugs her shoulders, just to wind him up. “How classy we talking?”

“Rikkatona’s on fifth, Claire, that’s goddamn classy for a blind date, fucking come on.” He’s talking with his mouth full and she loves the irony. “We order some food, and she’s going for the truffle risotto with the lobster tail and the most expensive wine on the menu and I get a porterhouse and she says to me ‘you’re paying right?’ and laughs and gets to talking about her ex-boyfriend who’s some Wall Street broker guy who was gonna propose and now he’s getting cold feet…”

“Oh no…” Claire says, cringing internally, her face falling open in shock. Maybe he does have the worse story. “She didn’t…”

Brad reaches for the box of beer and rips it open easily. “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m the fucking patsy making the other guy jealous or some shit,” he cracks two bottles of beer open and hands one to her. “Worst of all, it doesn’t fucking work.”

Claire tries to hold onto her laughter, but it starts bubbling out of her again and she leans back against the couch, enraptured by his story. “How’d you know it didn’t work?”

His eyes are wrinkling, and it feels like it’s more about getting it off his shoulders than him genuinely being hurt. That’s better, somehow. “She takes a selfie of us, at the dinner table when the food comes and actually _sends it_ to this guy!” Brad’s laughing with her now, drowning himself in beer and pizza. “And I’m sitting there thinking like ‘Jesus fucking Christ, this dude should run and don’t look back’ and when he does text her back, something must have pissed her off because she threw her seventy five dollar glass of wine in my face and stormed out.”

“Oh my god,” Claire laughs again, brighter, trying to hide it behind her hand but she completely loses it when he does, tears peeling down from their eyes as they crack up. “Oh, that is a shitty, shitty date, Brad, you might take the win with that one.”

“Need to get something good out of the night, don’t I?” he asks and leans forward to grab another slice of pizza for his troubles; she lets him, since he’s had a nightmare and all she’s done is laughed at his pain. “I just paid the bill, maxed out my limit and missed the last train home since she was late.”

Her forehead falls forward and rests on his knee as her shoulders shake in laughter. “Yeah, okay, you definitely win,” Claire says, sitting back up for a minute. “None of my shitty dates can compare to that.”

“Cheers to being fucking losers, and winning at it,” he replies, clinking his bottle of beer with hers. Brad drinks the rest of his beer, sliding down to sit on the floor next to her. “C’mon then, Saffitz, I shared my epic fail, you gotta tell me yours, quid pro quota whatever.”

Claire shuffles her feet underneath her, so Brad has room to stretch his long legs out on her tiny apartment floor. It’s not room enough, really, but they’ve been in closer quarters and lived. “I am definitely not talking to you about my dating experiences, Brad.” She offers him the last slice of pizza, but he shakes his head no and she gratefully takes it instead. “But the worst one was this guy Jonathan, I’d been seeing for a few weeks…”

“I hate him already,” Brad jokes, his arm lying across the couch. “Keep going.”

Her eyes roll to the back of her head, she’s sure. “And he says he’s got this picnic in the park at lunchtime, asks me if I could bring dessert, right? And I go to meet him and there’s a blanket and food and he takes the dessert from me, and says ‘don’t sit down, Rebecca’s coming’.”

Brad almost chokes on his beer. “I take it back, Claire, that’s got me beat. What a fucking asshole.”

She giggles too, since she can do that now the memory doesn’t hurt so much. Pain and frustration never feel bad when Brad’s there to share it with her, lately. Her cheeks feel warm from the beer and pizza’s gone, her notes and books stacked on the coffee table next to the beer and it’s just them alone without work in between them. Maybe it’s not how she imagined Saturday nights when she first moved to the city, but he’s the best friend she has here, and that makes up for all of the worst parts of New York, ten times over.

“Seem to attract assholes, don’t I?” she asks. His arm’s still slung on the top of the couch, his fingers grazing her shoulder. “We’ve both had a run of bad luck lately.” 

“You can’t count the burn, Claire, that’s my fault, not the universe at large,” Brad says, glancing down at her left hand. “I fuck up a lot of things, if I’m being honest,” he sounds different, voice lower and more serious. “I don’t wanna make any more mistakes, you know?”

Suddenly it’s not funny stories and beer on her living room floor. Brad’s looking into her eyes as if he’s searching for something meaningful, bigger than the both of them, and Claire thinks that maybe it isn’t just her imagination. His fingers tentatively graze at her shoulder an arm’s length away and she’s going to burn out if he stops touching her, stops looking at her.

“What mistakes would you be making, exactly?” she asks tentatively, eyes wide and searching, begging for this to be real. She hopes it’s what she wants, what he wants, with the way he’s looking at her.

She sees him swallow thickly before there’s a flash of a smile on his face. “Hurting you,” he says absently, glancing down at her slightly scarred hand and she thinks she’s got it wrong, that he’s just feeling guilty about the accident and she’s an idiot again. That he could never- “Because I’m so fucking in love with you, I can’t get you out of my head but I’m gonna screw it up a few dozen times first and you deserve better than that, but this is fucking insane, Claire, I don’t know.”

Her mouth’s gone dry. She’s not nearly drunk enough for them to be having this conversation on her apartment floor at 1am on Saturday night. “I… what?” she stutters. “What?”

“Shit,” he whispers, dropping his fingers from her shoulder as if she’s the one burning him. “Just… I’m an idiot, okay? I don’t know words and feelings and it’s a mess and…”

“You what?” she says, in disbelief. “Where are you going?” she asks, panicking as Brad practically jumps up to get away from her and she’s so confused. “Brad!” Claire scrambles up from the floor, the world dropping beneath her.

“Just forget I said anything, Claire, please, it’s just uh… shitty night and too much to drink and-”

“But you can’t just go!” she says angrily, grabbing his jacket before he could. Her head’s so wound up and confused. “You can’t go, I’ve got your jacket. You can’t go.”

“Claire, just give me it back,” Brad says, half a smile playing on his lips. “I think we’ve established a line here,” he gestures between them, “And it’s gonna fuck everything up now so just give me my jacket.”

“No!” she says, demands, because it’s just not fair. “You can’t just declare something like that and then run out when I don’t know what to say back. I need… I need to think, and I need you to stay and… and I need to think. You tell me you love me when I’m in cat pajamas and thinking about pop rocks and my terrible ex-boyfriend.”

He frowns a little but pushes his sleeves up in determination. “Yeah, alright, yeah, I got bad timing, maybe, but it’s true. I’m in love with you, Claire, and I got all night to talk about it. Whatcha think about that?”

Claire’s voice is stuck somewhere around the back of her throat. She’s quiet for the longest time but Brad waits for her. He stands there patiently, his arms crossed over his chest and that’s what does it. He’s giving her exactly what she asked for.

“I love you too,” Claire says too loudly to be entirely romantic but Brad’s face cracks into a big grin regardless. “I love you. I just don’t know what to do about that.”

“Normally now would be the time you kiss me,” he says, taking a couple steps towards her. The jacket slips from her hands and he tosses it back over the couch. Brad stands tall above her, cups her head in his palm and leans down deeply, kissing her lips as if he’s waited years to do it. Maybe he has. 

Her hands slide around his torso because he’s just so freaking tall and strong and she’s giving back as much as she can when the kiss deepens, Brad only stopping to lift her to sit on the back of the couch. He doesn’t seem to care about the pizza breath or her cat pajamas.

-

It’s the best Sunday morning of his life.

It doesn’t even matter that he’s awake at 7.30am because Claire’s making coffee and he’s spent the night on her lumpy couch. Space, time, thinking room, whatever she needs, he's willing to give because he's in fucking love with Claire Saffitz, and you give a woman like Claire all the time in the world because she has to rationalise and study every part of her feelings before she lets herself hope. He’ll wait, because of course he will.

Brad makes her pancakes after she hands him a second cup of coffee, and the taste of blueberries on her lips is better than anything he’s ever made. He wants every day to be like this.

It is.


End file.
